The Power of Kindness

For those who read my blog, I trust you read Marshall's comment on my entry last week along with my response to it. Marshall raises a good point, and I trust my response to him helped clarify things a little. In one sense, revelation by its very definition requires God to break through our cultural limitations in order to show us things. But my point is that until Jesus showed up, the inability of those receiving revelation to fully catch God's heart (even when He expressed it) means that the revelation of the Father by Jesus always trumps any other view of Him. It's not that some of the OT pictures of God are wrong, of course, but that they are incomplete and fuzzy because of the inability of folks at the time to grasp or express things as they are (similar to the Creation story which omits quantum physics, among other things!). But I get a headache (and you probably get bored) when I go too far with this, so enough said for now.

So...just a brief elaboration today on what I tweeted earlier today: the power of kindness. I have been struck of late how important it is for us both to experience God's kindness and express kindness to everyone we possibly can. Kindess is God's preferred method for leading us to change--Romans 2:4b. It's also an absolutely crucial expression of who He is to all people. Graham Cooke is fond of rightly saying, "God is the kindest being in the Universe," and those who know Him well know that this is wonderfully true and readily experienced.

Because God's nature includes infinite kindness, and because kindness is His preferred method for leading people to Himself (where "repentance" always get us), it seems obvious that followers of Jesus would be marked by remarkable and "highly noticeable" kindness. Reflecting God's image via kindness seems to me to be one of the most profound ways we can woo others towards Jesus.

Thankfully, kindness is part of the fruit that the Holy Spirit produces in us as we live loved, listening and saturated by His presence. So notice that I am not talking about "random acts of kindness" but rather a lifestyle characterized by kindness that is produced as we experience God's kindness towards us and others. "Acts of kindness" are certainly good and are the result of a truly kind heart, but it's possible to "do kind things" without being motivated by that gentle, other-regarding love that God's kindness is made of. It seems to me that most folks, even little children, can read whether or not a kind act is motivated by genuine interest in them or just something we do out of duty. Who wants to be loved out of duty? But when someone really stops and takes time to be kind in a way that suggests I am treasured, important, worth noticing...ahhhhh, now that invites a response, a question, a quest.

Anyway, I am tired and probably not making much sense, but I pray that God's kindness be so revealed to you in the days ahead that you can't help but begin to spill it out on those around you, especially perhaps to those whom others don't see.

Loving the power of His kindness.

Tom, one of Abba's children